That theory says that a vocabulary of counting words is needed for a person to conceptualise numbers above three.

The researchers tested 32 Aboriginal children between the ages of four and seven years old from two communities in the Northern Territory, Australia - one from the Warlpiri language group located on the edge of the Tanami Desert, and another from the Anindilyakwa language group on Goote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Both languages have very restricted vocabularies for numbers, limited to words for one, two, few and many.

The team also studied 13 English-speaking Indigenous children in Melbourne.

Reeve, and colleagues from Australia and the United Kingdom, asked the children to perform tasks such as putting down counters to match the number of times two sticks were tapped together.

Equally matched

They found that Warlpiri and Anindilyakwa-speaking children performed equal to or better than English-speaking children on tasks that involved numbers up to nine, despite the fact that they lacked the relevant words for those numbers.

"What you know about numbers isn't just encoded in your language, it's much more than that," Reeve says.

"In our view there are some very basic number competencies that are encoded in the genome in some way."

He says that innate 'number sense' possibly includes the ability to recognise and represent the number of objects in a set, and a basic ability to understand simple addition and subtraction.

Reeve adds that the study also has implications for the way numeracy is taught to very young children.

"Much of our education is currently based on language," he says. "We need to ensure that there is a mapping between these basic concepts and the concepts you're trying to teach."